The Social Imaginary of Telephony

The Social Imaginary of Telephony Fictional Dispositives in Albert Robida’s Le Vingtième Siècle and the Archeology of “Talking Cinema”1 Alain Boillat What I propose to do here, within a perspective involving both epistemology and the archaeology of media, is to approach “talking cinema” through the examination of discourses produced in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, that is, almost fifty years prior to the generalization of talkies and the institutionalization of practices related to sound in the domain of cinema.2 Beyond this specific medium, I will examine the series of machines of audiovisual representation, one of whose many actualiza- tions was “talking cinema” (which is why quotation marks are fitting here, with regard to “cinema” as well as “talking”). Among the many inventions from which various experimentations with “talking cinema” may be said to derive, I will emphasize the technique of telephony. Indeed, its study presents the advantage of encompassing a number of auditive or audiovisual dispositives that are often much more difficult to reduce to their place in the genealogy of (institutionalized) cinema than viewing dispositives. On a methodological level, de-centering the point of view is precisely what appears productive to me, as the discussion of the place given to the voice within various audio(visual) dispositives constitutes the theoretical horizon of my observations.3 1 Translator’s note: the French expression “cinéma parlant” (literally, “talking cinema”) is usually translated as “sound cinema” in English, but given the focus of this chapter and the existence of the term “talkies” in English, it is translated as “talking cinema” here. 2 The attention given to “talkies before (the institutionalization of) talkies” should be placed in the context of recent research on “the archaeology” of the pairing between moving images and synchronized sound. On this point, see Edouard Arnoldy, Pour une histoire culturelle du cinéma. Au-devant de “scènes filmées”, de “films chantants et parlants” et de comédies musicales (Liège: Céfal, 2004) as well as the contributions published in Le Muet a la parole. Cinéma et performance à l’aube du XXe siècle, Giusy Pisano and Valérie Pozner, eds. (Paris: AFRHC, 2005). 3 This reflection, one dimension of which is being considered here, started in other places, in particular in Du bonimenteur à la voix-over. Voix-attraction et voix-narration au cinéma (Laus- anne: Antipodes, 2007); and in “The lecturer, the image, the machine and the audio-spectator. The voice as a component part of audio-visual dispositives” and “On the particular status of the human voice. Tomorrow’s Eve and the cultural series of talking machines,” both published in Cinema Beyond Film: Media Epistemology in the Modern Era (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010), 215-31 and 233-51, respectively. 218 Alain BOILLAT It seems rather improbable that the telephone, considered today as belonging in the sphere of telecommunications, and whose invention is usually credited to Alexander Graham Bell (who registered a patent for it in February 18764), would cross paths with the series of moving images, even when these come with recorded sounds. Some differences touching on the relations established between representation and addressee of the vocal (or audiovisual) message would at the very least cast doubts on the possibility. These differences may be spelled out thanks to the following, necessarily basic classification, whose oppositional pairs should not be seen as hermetically separate, at least if the hybridity of phenomena tied to the emergence and constitution of the media in question is to be taken into account:5 Telephone Cinematograph Listeners-Users Spectators Domestic space, individual use Public space, collective participation Simultaneous interactive communication Unidirectional, deferred transmission Reversibility of the poles of communication: Reversibility of the Lumière appliance: listener/speaker recording/projection6 When considering these different features and the traditional and monolithic conception of the two media they assume, the unidirectional communication with a collective audience (projection) implied in the film show proves very different from the dominant use of the telephone, which consists in an interactive communication carried out by a user in a private space. However, just as the “cinema” met with very heterogeneous condi- tions of exhibition,6 the telephone – especially when combined with other 4 Elisha Gray or Antonio Meucci have also been credited with the invention, and this disputed paternity is indicative of the more general relation between research on the electric distance transmission of a voice and the spirit of an era, when similar experiments were being carried out concurrently. 5 On this account, I could make the following observation my own: “Classifications, it seems to us, appear tenuous when their aim is to define media out of univocal functions, at all costs, even if it means overshadowing both their hybrid nature and their uses, and precluding thinking on their intersections, their geneses, and their developments.” François Albera and Maria Tortajada, “Prolégomènes à une critique des ‘télé-dispositifs’,” in La Télévision, du téléphonoscope à YouTube. Pour une archéologie de l’audiovision, Mireille Berton and Anne-Katrin Weber, eds. (Lausanne: Antipodes, 2009) 39. 6 All the more so when considering, as Rick Altman does, the changeable character of experiments with sonorization. See Sound Theory, Sound Practice, ed. Rick Altman (New York, London: Routledge, 1992). TH E SOCIAL IMAGINARY of TELEPHONY 219 devices – gave rise to a wide variety of distinct uses and dispositives which may not be reduced solely to the parameters mentioned above. A convincing example could be the first Kinetophone, commercialized by Edison in 1895, which resulted from a combination of the Phonograph and the Kinetoscope previously exploited in the same parlors7 (if in a totally independent man- ner: customers would listen to music on one side, watch animated views on the other). These places of mass entertainment thus housed separately two techniques meant for specific uses, and which were later combined in a single system thanks to the synchronization of the Phonograph’s cylinder and the film running in the Kinetoscope. Like the telephone booth, then, the Kinetophone required the user to handle an audio receiver in a public space. This type of convergence highlights the importance of diachronic variations affecting different cultural series in which a given technology may find a place (successively or simultaneously).8 Thinking About the Way Uses Were Thought Up Telephony had various applications in its history, and according to the situation, these brought about distinct dispositives.9 Inscribed in the spectacular context of the presentation of a technical “attraction,” Bell and Watson’s historic call between New York and Malden on October 9, 1876, chronicled in the March 17, 1877 issue of La Nature, epitomizes the diversity of uses for the telephone, which were to lead to specific dispositives later. Indeed, besides the individual conversation, the following contents succeeded one another as part of the same demonstration:10 information on the stock exchange, already one of the main uses of the telegraph11 (in fact, the piece in La Nature refers to the telephone as a “talking telegraph”); 7 See the illustration reproduced in Georges Sadoul, Histoire générale du cinéma, vol. 1 (Paris: Denoël, 1946) 268. 8 The notion of “cultural series” is borrowed from André Gaudreault, and notably his “Les vues cinématographiques selon Georges Méliès, ou: comment Mitry et Sadoul avaient peut-être raison d’avoir tort (même si c’est surtout Deslandes qu’il faut lire et relire)…,” in Georges Méliès, l’illusionniste fin de siècle? Jacques Malthête and Michel Marie, eds. (Paris: Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1997). 9 “Dispositive” here refers to a set of interactions between the poles of machinery, representation and spectator. On this conception, see Maria Tortajada and François Albera, “L’Epistémè ‘1900’,” in Le Cinématographe, nouvelle technologie du XXe siècle, André Gaudreault, Catherine Russell and Pierre Véronneau, eds. (Lausanne: Payot, 2004). 10 “Le télégraphe parlant,” La Nature 198 (17 Mar. 1877): 251. 11 For a narrative use of this kind of application, see Alexandre Dumas’s Le Comte de Monte- Christo (vol. II, chapters LX to LXVI). 220 Alain BOILLAT the reading of daily newspapers, prefiguring news reports on the radio and on television; questions addressed to the interlocutor by dumbfounded observers, evoking the context of conjuring or séances (surprisingly, one person did in fact ask the interlocutor to predict the future!); finally, the transmission of music, “as if we had been in a concert hall.” This precision by the writer echoes the function Philippe Reiss (Germany) had foreseen for the telephone, and which was assumed by photographic technique, precisely. In his praise of talking pictures, a form of filmed speech that introduced the series of the first Vitaphone Shorts, William Hays also considered that the primary function of sound cinema lay in a wider access to classical music.12 These different media had clearly been devised for similar uses, even as other directions more specific to each of them later developed. The diversity of uses considered for the telephone in the 1870s and the 1880s points to an intermedial phase in Rick Altman’s definition of the term, that

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